Looking into the past

While I was writing my post about the orphanage I started to wondering if I could find the orphanage online anywhere.

Maybe someone working there would remember me and could tell me a little bit more about what I was like there. We know that I had to be fed first and that I really liked coke but not much else. Maybe they would have a funny story or something about me.

I did a quick google search and I found a news letter from 2003 from an orphanage with the same name but in a different location in Honduras. At the bottom was an email address of someone who I assumed worked there. I sent them an email asking if they did in fact work there or knew of anyone who was working there.

I got a response back earlier this week from a man who no longer worked there but was able to provide me with the email address of someone who does. I asked this person if they knew anyone who might have worked there during the same time period I was there. She said she did and was glad to help.

This morning I sent her an email that she could forward asking if anyone remembered me. I haven't herd back yet but I'll be interested to see if anyone responds.

The Adoption Story - Nelson/Roberto

I haven't talked much about the adoption side of things on this blog yet so I want to get into that a little bit more. I'm probably going to mess up some of my facts since I was only a little baby when some of this happened. I'm sure my mother will do a much better job of telling it but here it goes.

I was adopted from an orphanage in Honduras in 1983. My adoptive parents had just started the adoption process and were probably about a year away from getting a child. Then one night they got a phone call around 9:00pm saying that there was a child available for them however there was no picture, no background information and they would have until 3:00pm the next day to decided. I don't think this ever happens in adoption cases.

Thankfully, after a long night with not much sleep, they decided to adopt. They were living in the Boston area and had to rush to get everything ready before leaving for Honduras. It was the beginning of April and they had to be down in Central America by May. As they were getting ready to leave they found out that they would need FBI clearance in order to travel to Honduras. This normally takes 4 or 5 weeks and they only had one. To their surprise someone(we'll call him/her a Mystery Politician) pulled some strings for them and Senator Kerry's office was able to get them clearance in 2 days.

They flew down to Honduras where they were provided with a place to stay and a lawyer to help them with all the paper work. Again, this never happens. As the adoption went on the people involved where very hush hush and wouldn't tell my parents anything. They mentioned something about a gunfight but wouldn't say why I was up for adoption or why they were trying to get me out of the country so fast. My adoptive father speculated that I was illegitimate sun of the president or something like that. They did learn that our Mystery Politician was overseeing the adoption and this explained where all the political help was coming from.

They finished the adoption and took be back to the US with them. The judge who oversaw my case required that my father mail her updates every 6 months. My father diligently sent letters for almost 2 years. While talking to another parent about there experience he learned that these updates were not part of the normal adoption process and he promptly stopped. This seamed to the make the whole adoption that much weirder.

I grew up knowing that I was adopted (My parents are white and they always told me I was.) But they couldn't tell me who my parents were or even when I was born. This was very hard for me growing up since it meant it would be next to impossible to find my birth family. My Adopted father had this newspaper article that someone had gotten for us. The article had a picture of a man who had been killed around the time that I went into the orphanage. As I was growing up he would look at the picture and try to see if there was any resemblance between us.

Then one day the impossible happened. My parents got another phone call at night in the summer of 97. A man called from an organization called Probusqueda that looked for lost children in El Salvador. It turned out I had been born there not Honduras and my birth family had been looking for me for 4 years. My parents told me soon after when I got home from summer camp. It was a huge shock for all of us.

The organization sent us pictures and letters from them written to the lost child Roberto(that's me.) After a blood test to confirm that hey were indeed my family we started to make arrangements to fly down. In truth they really didn't need to do the blood test. I look exactly like my birth father and a lot like my older brother.

That Christmas we flew down to meet them the for the first time. My adopted parent were nervous that I would want to stay with my birth family but that never really crossed my mind. Since then I have been down about twice a year to visit them and we have become one big family. Its been truly an amazing and I'm so lucky to have had such wonderful adoptive parents who supported me all these years and when I went to meet my birth family.

Part 2 - The back story or read the e-book

The Back Story - by Nelson/Roberto

Most of this was taken from my college essay and was written about 8 years ago. Since then we have learned a lot more about the details, so it isn't entirely accurate. However it should give you an idea of how I was separated from my family and how they found me again. I will let my mother write about all the details. :)

With the introduction of my birth family came the information of my past and the story of my life.

My story begins even before I was born. My birth father and mother where around 20. My father had been influenced by high school teachers to join the revolutionary movement in El Salvador. Soon after he began his work he met my other Ana Milgro Escobar. Despite objections from her family she joined the movement as well. They were married shortly after in a ceremony of arms.

The group they were a part of the was called the FPL which was one of the sub groups that made up the FLMN. My father was a body guard to the head of the FPL while my mother worked to coordinate the different cells. (In the war people worked in smaller groups called cells. If one cell was captured it did not know enough to give away any information.) This was a very important potion for my mother who had just turned 20.

Later that year, my father was in a gunfight somewhere in the mountains of El Salvador. He was shot inches away from his heart. He spend 3 long days in hiding barely hanging on to life. If one of his brothers had not given him blood he would have surely died.

He was taken to Nicaragua for surgery. He managed to survive the operation but needed a second one to remove the bullet. This required him to go to Cuba. After four months in Cuba he had not gotten the operation and returned to Nicaragua to see my mother. At this point, my brother and sister had been sent to live in Costa Rica with my Grandmother. It was around this time that I was born. My mother and I lived in El Salvador for three month before it became unsafe to live there anymore.

My mother was supposed to meet up with my father in Costa Rica, but it never happened. She was reassigned on a new mission. She and two other men kidnapped a businessman in Honduras. We lived in a safe house for a few months, but the Honduran government found out where she was living. They stormed the house and killed my mother and the two men. This was three days before my first birthday. The police found me in a back room with two other little girls.

They did not know what to do with us so we were put in an orphanage. I stayed there for a whole year before I was adopted. They put sever notices in the paper saying that if any was missing children or knew the who we were they should come forward and claim us. No one came forward and after a year in the orphanage I was adopted.

Around this time my birth father had found out that his wife had been killed and his son was missing. He was furious at certain people within the FPL because they would not let him look for me or give him any information. Disillusioned he left the revolution and warned around Central America. He ended up in Panama where he worked 2 jobs only to earn $20 in a month. One of these jobs was doing silk screening. Think that he could do that on his own he set off to make a better life. He remarried and was able to create a stable business for him and his family.

Through a friend he learned that I had been adopted to a family in America. He began thinking about coming to America to look for me. However he had no idea where I lived so it would be impossible to find me.

In 1992 my grandmother began her search to find me. It took her a year to find an organization that would help her. An organization called Probusqueda spent four more years going though newspapers and whatever government documents they could get their hands on trying to find me. They finally completed their research in 1997 after doing an Internet search to find our phone number. We where contacted by a man working for the Physicians for Human Rights and given a copy of all their findings. After a blood test confirmed that they were my family we made arrangements to meet them during Christmas.

Update: I did some major editing to this entry so it would work better with the adoption story.

Read the whole story in our e-book